We wound up in the kitchen of someone’s house. The walls were all bright yellow. Muffled mariachi music boomed through the room from the backyard. Charles gestured for me to sit down at a table I had to slide behind, like a booth, with Carlos to my left, tapping his fingers to some other beat he was hearing in his own head. Charles was across from me, staring straight at me.
“You know where we’re at?”
“I’m guessing somewhere Octavio might end up being at, but I don’t know why the fuck you would think that was a good idea.”
Charles laughed a fake laugh. “You remember the time we went over to Dimond Park, and we went through that long sewer tube? We ran through it, and at some point there was no light, just the sound of the rushing water and we didn’t know where the fuck it came from or where it was going. We had to jump over it. You remember we heard a voice, and then you thought someone grabbed your leg, and you squealed like a little fucking baby pig, and you almost fell in but I pulled you back and we jumped and ran out of there together?” Charles said, sliding a bottle of tequila on the table in front of him back and forth. “I’m trying to get you into the position of being grabbed,” Charles said, and stopped sliding the bottle. He gripped it, held it still. “When Octavio sees your face, it’s gonna be like that, and I’m’a pull you back, save you from being taken down that long tube to nowhere. You ain’t getting outta this shit alone, you feel me?”
Carlos put his arm around me and I tried to shrug it off. Charles leaned back and let his big arms fall to his sides.
Right on cue, Octavio walked into the kitchen. His eyes turned into bullets—he shot them around the room. “What the fuck is this, Charlos?”
That’s what Octavio called Charles and Carlos because they were always together and they looked alike. It was a way to put them in their place, make them know they were both equally less important than him, Octavio, who stood six foot six, with a barrel chest and muscular arms you could see even through the triple-extra-large black T-shirt he always wore.
“Octavio,” Charles said, “take it easy, I’m just trying to remind him what’s what. Don’t trip. He’s gonna pay. He’s my little brother, Octavio, no disrespect, man. I just want him to know.”
“Know what? No disrespect? What is that, Charlos? I don’t think you even know.”
Octavio pulled out an all-white magnum from the front of his belt and pointed it at my face while looking at Charles.
“What the fuck kinda games you think we’re playing here,” Octavio said, looking at Charles, but talking to me. “You take, then you owe. You don’t pay, you lose the shit, I don’t give a fuck how you lost it, it’s gone, then you disappear and show up in my uncle’s fucking kitchen. You’re fucking crazy, Charlos. I came here to have a good time. But because you got my shit stolen, and because your brother smoked all his shit up, you both owe me, and I got into some shit with who I get the shit from, and now I owe, and we’re all fucked if we don’t make some real money, real soon.”
Octavio kept the gun pointed at me. Smoked all his shit up? What the fuck? I stared down the barrel of the gun. I went into it. Straight into the tunnel of it. I saw the way it had to go down. Octavio was gonna turn around to the countertop behind him to get a drink, then Charles would shoot up out of his chair and put Octavio in a choke hold from behind. The gun would drop to the ground in the struggle, and Charles, he’d hold him there, turn them both around, and trying to suddenly be a good big brother, he’d yell at me, “Get the fuck out of here!” But I wouldn’t leave. I’d know just what to do. I’d grab the gun on the floor. I’d pick up the gun and point it at Octavio’s head and look at Charles.
“Give me the gun, Calvin. Get the fuck out of here,” Charles would say.
“I’m not leaving,” I’d tell him.
“Shoot him then,” Charles would say.
Then me and Octavio would catch eyes. I’d notice for the first time that Octavio’s eyes were green. I’d look into those eyes so long it’d make Octavio mad, and he’d slam Charles back into the cupboards. Then I’d tell them all how they’re gonna make Octavio drink, that he was gonna drink until he couldn’t stand up anymore. I’d tell them that if they made him drink enough he wouldn’t remember shit. We’d make the blackout so bad it would go forward and backward in time, swallow the night.
My eyes were closed. For a second I wondered if I might still be in the car, dreaming the scene from the backseat. It was a night like so many others I’d had before. Maybe I’d wake up in the backseat, we’d go home, and I’d get back to the life I was trying to make that didn’t include any of this shit.
I opened my eyes. Octavio was still holding the gun, but he was laughing. Charles started to laugh too. Octavio set the gun on the table and they hugged, the two of them, Charles and Octavio. Then Carlos got up and shook hands with Octavio.
“These are the pieces you had made?” Charles said to Octavio, picking up the white gun.
“Nah, this one’s special. You remember David? Manny’s little brother. He made them in his fucking basement. The rest just look like nines. Go on, tell him,” Octavio said to Charles, looking at me.
“You remember when I told you about that Laney powwow, you said you wanted to go because there was that big one coming up at the Oakland Coliseum, and you were on the powwow committee for work. You remember that?” Charles said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You remember what else you told me?”
“No,” I said.
“About the money,” Charles said.
“Money?” I said.
“You said there would be something like fifty thousand dollars in cash prizes there that day,” Charles said. “And how easy it would be to steal.”
“I was fucking joking, Charles. You think I would fucking rob the people I work with and then think I could get away with it? It was a fucking joke.”
“That’s funny,” Octavio said.
Charles lifted his head toward Octavio like: Whatsup?
“That anyone would think you would rob the people you work with and think you could get away with it. That shit’s funny to me,” Octavio said.
“This is how we make it right,” Charles said. “You’ll get a cut too, then we’ll be good, right, Octavio?”
Octavio nodded his head. Then he picked up the tequila bottle. “Let’s drink,” he said.
So we drank. We went through half the bottle, shot after shot. Before the last shot there was a pause, and Octavio looked up at me, then lifted his shot glass toward me and gestured for me to get up. We took the shot, just me and him, then he gave me a hug I forgot to return. While he hugged me, I saw Charles look at Carlos like he didn’t like what was happening. After Octavio let me go he turned around and got another bottle of tequila from the top cupboard, then he sort of laughed at who knows what and stumbled across then left the kitchen.
Charles lifted his head up to me like: Let’s go. On the way to the car we saw a kid on his bike watching everyone from far off. I could tell Charles was almost gonna say something to him. Then Carlos tried to punk him by acting like he was gonna hit him. The kid didn’t flinch. Just kept staring at the house. His eyes were hella droopy but not just like he was high or drunk. I thought about Sloth from The Goonies. And then I thought about a movie I saw one Saturday morning when I was, like, five or six. It was about a kid who woke up blind one day. Before, I’d never thought about the idea that you could just wake up to some terrible shit, some fucked-up shift in what you thought life was. And that’s what it felt like then. Taking those shots. Octavio’s embrace. Agreeing to some doomed-ass plan. I wanted to say something to the kid on his bike. I don’t know why. There was nothing to say. We got in the car and rode home in silence, the low sound of the engine and road leading us toward some shit we’d never make our way back from.
Jacquie Red Feather
JACQUIE RED FEATHER FLEW to Phoenix from Albuquerque the evening before the conference started, landing after the hour-long flight in a smog-filled gradient between green and pink. When the plane slowed to a roll, she shut the window shade and stared at the back of the seat in front of her. “Keeping Them from Harm.” That was this year’s conference theme. She guessed they meant self-harm. But was the problem really suicide itself? She’d recently read an article that called the number of suicides in Native communities staggering. For how many years had there been federally funded programs trying to prevent suicide with billboards and hotlines? It was no wonder it was getting worse. You can’t sell life is okay when it’s not. This was yet another Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration conference her position as substance abuse counselor was grant-required to attend.
The woman who checked her in at the hotel had Florencia on her name tag. She smelled like beer, cigarettes, and perfume. That she was drinking on the job, or that she’d come to work drunk, made Jacquie like her. Jacquie was ten days sober. Florencia complimented Jacquie’s hair, which she’d recently dyed black to hide the gray and cut into a bob. Jacquie had never known what to do with a compliment.
“So red,” she said of the poinsettias behind Florencia, which Jacquie didn’t even like because of how even the real ones look fake.
“We call them flores de noche beuna, flowers of the holy night, because they bloom around Christmas.”
“But it’s March,” Jacquie said to her.
“I think they’re the most beautiful flowers,” Florencia said.
Jacquie’s latest relapse had not left burn holes in her life. She didn’t lose her job, and she hadn’t wrecked her car. She was sober again, and ten days is the same as a year when you want to drink all the time.
Florencia told Jacquie, who was noticeably sweating, that the pool was open until ten. The sun had gone down, but it was still ninety degrees. On the way to her room Jacquie saw that no one was in the pool.
Long after Jacquie’s mom had left her dad for good, during one of the many times her mom had left her sister’s dad, when Opal was just a baby and Jacquie was six, they’d stayed in a hotel near the Oakland airport. Their mom told them stories about moving away for good. About getting back home to Oklahoma. But home for Jacquie and her sister was a locked station wagon in an empty parking lot. Home was a long ride on a bus. Home was the three of them anywhere safe for the night. And that night in the hotel, with the possibility of taking a trip, of getting away from the life her mom had been running down with her daughters in tow, that night was one of the best nights of Jacquie’s life. Her mom had fallen asleep. Earlier she’d seen the pool—a bright blue glowing rectangle—on the way to their room. It was cold out, but she’d seen a sign that read Heated Pool. Jacquie watched TV and waited for her mom to fall asleep with Opal, then she snuck down to the pool. There was no one around. Jacquie took her shoes and socks off and dipped a toe in, then looked back up at the door of their room. She looked at all the doors and windows of the rooms that faced the pool. The night air was cool but didn’t move. With all but her shoes and socks on she walked down the pool stairs. It was her first time in a pool. She didn’t know how to swim. Mostly she just wanted to be in the water. To go under and open her eyes, look at her hands, watch the bubbles rise in that bluest light.
* * *
—
In her room she threw her bags down, took off her shoes, and laid on the bed. She turned the TV on, muted it, then rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling for a while, appreciating the blank white coolness of the room. She thought about Opal. The boys. What they might be doing. Over the past few months, after years of silence, they’d been texting. Opal took care of Jacquie’s three grandsons—whom she’d never even met.
What r u doing? Jacquie texted Opal. She put her phone on the bed and went to her suitcase to get her swimsuit. It was a black-and-white-striped one-piece. She put it on in front of the mirror. Scars and tattoos spanned and bent around her neck, stomach, arms, and ankles. There were feather tattoos on her forearms, one for her mom and one for her sister, and stars on the backs of her hands—those were just stars. The webs she had on the tops of her feet had hurt the worst.
Jacquie walked to the window to see if the pool was still empty. Her phone vibrated on the bed.
Orvil found spider legs in his leg, the text said.
WTF!? Jacquie texted back. But the sentence did not really take. What could that even mean? She would look this up on her phone later, “Spiders legs found in leg,” but find nothing.
Yeah idk. the boys think it means something ndn.
Jacquie smiled. She’d never seen Indian abbreviated as ndn before.
Maybe he’ll get powers like spider-man, Jacquie texted.
Anything like that ever happen to you?
What? no. i’m gonna go for a swim.
Jacquie kneeled in front of the minifridge. In her head she heard her mom say, “The spider’s web is a home and a trap.” And even though she never really knew what her mom meant by it, she’d been making it make sense over the years, giving it more meaning than her mom probably ever intended. In this case Jacquie was the spider, and the minifridge was the web. Home was to drink. To drink was the trap. Or something like that. The point was Do not open the fridge. And she didn’t.
* * *
—
Jacquie stood at the pool’s edge, watching the light on the water wobble and shimmer. Her arms, crossed over her stomach, looked green and cracked. She inched down the pool stairs, then pushed lightly off and swam underwater all the way across and back. She came back up for air, watched the surface of the water move for a while, then went back under and watched the bubbles gather, rise, and disappear.
While she smoked a cigarette by the pool, she thought about the taxi from the airport and the liquor store she’d seen just a block away from the hotel. She could walk down there. What she really wanted was that cigarette after six beers. She wanted sleep to come easy like it could when she drank. On the way back to her room she got a Pepsi and trail mix from the vending machine. On her bed, she flipped through channels, landing here and there, changing the channel at every commercial break, devouring the trail mix and Pepsi, and only then, her appetite awakened by the trail mix, did she realize that she hadn’t eaten dinner. She stayed awake with her eyes closed in bed for an hour, then put a pillow over her face and fell asleep. When she woke up at four in the morning, she didn’t know what was on top of her face. She threw the pillow across the room, then got up and peed and spent the next two hours trying to convince herself she was asleep, or sometimes actually sleeping but having the dream of not being able to sleep.
* * *
—
Jacquie found a seat in the back of the main ballroom. There was an old Indian guy in a baseball cap who had one hand up like he was praying, while the other flicked water out of a water bottle at the crowd. She’d never seen anything like it before.
Jacquie’s eyes wandered the room. She studied the Native decor. The room was big, with high ceilings and massive chandeliers, each one of which consisted of a grouping of eight flame-shaped lightbulbs surrounded by a giant band of corrugated metal with cutouts of tribal patterns, creating tribal-patterned shadows on the walls—multiple Kokopellis, zigzag lines and spirals, all up there at the top of the room, where the paint was the brownish red of dried blood. The carpets were crowded with winding lines and variegated geometric shapes—like every casino or movie-theater carpet.
She looked around at the crowd. There were probably two hundred or so people, all of them sitting at circular tables with glasses of water and little paper plates stacked with fruit and Danishes. Jacquie recognized the conference types. Most of them were old Indian women. Next came old white women. Then old Indian men. There were no young people to be seen. Everyone she saw seemed either too serious or not serious enough. These were career people, more driven by concern about keeping their jobs, about the funders and grant requirements, than by the need to help Indian families. Jacquie was no different. She knew it and hated this fact.
The first speaker, a man who looked like he might be more comfortable on a street corner than at a conference, approached the podium. You didn’t often see men like him standing on a stage. He wore Jordans and an Adidas tracksuit. He had an unrecognizable faded tattoo above his left ear that went up to the crown of his bald head—it could have been cracks, or webs, or a half crown of thorns. Every few seconds he opened his mouth in an oval shape and wiped the outside of it with his thumb and forefinger, as if there was excess saliva there, or as if, in the wiping, he was assuring himself he wouldn’t spit and look sloppy.
He stepped up to the mic. He spent a long, uncomfortable minute surveying the crowd. “I see a lotta Indian people out there. That makes me feel good. About twenty years ago I went to a conference like this, and it was just a sea of white faces. I came as a youth. It was my first time on a plane and the first time I was away from Phoenix for more than a few days. I’d been forced into a program as part of a plea bargain I took to stay outta juvie. That program ended up being featured at a conference in D.C.—a national highlight. They chose me and a few other youth not based on our leadership skills or because of our commitment to the cause, or because of our participation, but because we were the most at-risk. Of course all we had to do was sit on the stage, listen to youth success stories and to our youth services staff talk about how great our programming was. But while I was on that trip my little brother, Harold, found a gun I kept in my closet. He shot himself between the eyes with that gun. He was fourteen,” the guy said and coughed off-mic. Jacquie shifted in her chair.
“What I’m here to talk about is how our whole approach since day one has been like this: Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they’ve inherited. And we’re either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths, just like I did with my brother, or we’re absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up. I’m in suicide prevention now. I’ve had fifteen relatives commit suicide over the course of my life, not counting my brother. I had one community I was working with recently in South Dakota tell me they were grieved out. That was after experiencing seventeen suicides in their community in just eight months. But how do we instill in our children the will to live? At these conferences. And in the offices. In the emails and at the community events, there has to be an urgency, a do-whatever-at-any-cost sort of spirit behind what we do. Or fuck the programs, maybe we should send the money to the families themselves, who need it and know what to do with it, since we all know what that money goes toward, salaries and conferences like this one. I’m sorry. I get paid outta that shit too, and actually, shit, I’m not sorry, this issue shouldn’t be met with politeness or formality. We can’t get lost in the career advancements and grant objectives, the day-to-day grind, as if we have to do what we do. We choose what we do, and in that choice comes the community. We are choosing for them. All the time. That’s what these kids are feeling. They have no control. Guess what kinda control they do have? We need to be about what we’re always saying we’re about. And if we can’t, and we’re really just about ourselves, we need to step aside, let somebody else from the community who really cares, who’ll really do something, let them come in and help. Fuck all the rest.”
Jacquie was out of the room before the audience even started its hesitant, obligatory clapping. As she ran, her name badge jangled around her neck, sliced at her chin. When she got to her room, she closed the door with her back and slid down, collapsed and sobbed against it. She pressed her eyes into her knees and bursts of purple, black, green, and pink splotches bloomed there, behind her eyes, then slowly formed into images, then memories. She saw the big hole first. Then her daughter’s emaciated body. There were little red and pink holes up and down both her arms. Her skin was white, blue, and yellow, with green veins. Jacquie was there to identify the body. The body was her daughter’s body, had been the little body she carried for just six months. She’d watched the doctors put needles in her arm then, there in the incubator, back when all she’d wanted in a way she’d never wanted anything before was for her new baby girl to live. The coroner looked at Jacquie, pen and clipboard in hand. She spent a long time staring somewhere between the body and the clipboard trying not to scream, trying not to scan up to see her daughter’s face. The big hole. The shot between the eyes. Like a third eye, or an empty third-eye socket. The trickster spider, Veho, her mom used to tell her and Opal about, he was always stealing eyes to see better. Veho was the white man who came and made the old world watch with his eyes. Look. See here, the way it’s gonna be is, first you’re gonna give me all your land, then your attention, until you forget how to give it. Until your eyes are drained and you can’t see behind you and there’s nothing ahead, and the needle, the bottle, or the pipe is the only thing in sight that makes any sense. In her car, Jacquie slammed the bottoms of her fists into the steering wheel until she couldn’t anymore. She broke her pinkie on the wheel.
That was thirteen years ago. She’d been sober six months then. The longest since she’d started drinking. But after that she drove straight to the liquor store, spent the next six years stomaching a fifth of whiskey a night. She drove an AC Transit bus, the 57 line, in and out of Oakland six days a week. Drank herself into a manageable oblivion every night. Woke up every day to work. One day she fell asleep at the wheel and crashed her bus into a telephone pole. After a month in residential treatment, she left Oakland. She still doesn’t know, doesn’t remember how she got to Albuquerque. At some point she got a job as a receptionist at an Indian Health Clinic funded by Indian Health Service, then eventually, without ever achieving any significant sobriety, became a certified substance abuse counselor through an online course her work paid for.
There in her hotel room, down against the hotel-room door, she remembered all the pictures Opal had emailed her over the years of the boys, which she’d refused to look at. She stood up and walked to her laptop on the desk. In her Gmail account she searched Opal’s name. She opened each email with the paper-clip icon. She followed them through the years. Birthdays and first bikes and pictures they’d drawn. There were little video clips of them fighting in the kitchen and sleeping in their bunk beds, all in one room. The three of them crowded around a computer screen, that screen glow on their faces. There was one picture that broke her heart. The three of them lined up in front of Opal. Opal with her static, sober, stoic stare. She looked at Jacquie through all the years and all that they’d been through. Come get them, they’re yours, Opal’s face said. The youngest one was half smiling like one of his brothers had just punched him in the arm but Opal had told them all they better smile for the picture. The middle one looked like he was either pretending to or actually was holding up what looked like a gang sign with his fingers across his chest, smiling a big smile. He looked the most like Jacquie’s daughter Jamie. The oldest one didn’t smile. He looked like Opal. He looked like Jacquie and Opal’s mom, Vicky.
Jacquie wanted to go to them. She wanted a drink. She wanted to drink. She needed a meeting. Earlier she’d seen that the AA meeting for the conference would be on the second floor at seven thirty every night. There were always meetings at conferences, it being a mental-health/substance-abuse-prevention-based conference, full of people like her, who had gotten into the field because they’d been through it and hoped to find meaning in their careers helping other people not make the same mistakes they had. When she went to wipe sweat from her face with her sleeve, she realized the air conditioner had been turned off. She went to the AC unit and turned the cold air on high. She fell asleep waiting to cool down.